Summary

This chapter provided a high-level look at directory services in general, as well as a brief discussion of some of the directories we are primarily interested in, such as Active Directory and ADAM.

We concluded with a survey of the LDAP basics, including a discussion of schemas and the basic operations in the LDAP Protocol.

We skipped a lot of details and purposely avoided showing any C-style function signatures. The various RFCs, as well as Microsoft's own documentation of its LDAP API implementation, cover all of this in gory detail. While we only dipped our toes into a lot of this information, we did so that when we get into some of the sticky topics later on and we talk about what is going on under the hood, we will have a little background.